Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.
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Cornered! The inconvenient truth about Blackberry
Cornered! The inconvenient truth about Blackberry | The inconvenient truth about Blackberry |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Tuesday, 19 February 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 2 The press release explained that "Vodafone Neverfail High Availability Service for BlackBerry monitors the health of the entire email environment, including the server hardware, the network infrastructure, the application and the operating system. If any anomalies are identified, Neverfail will immediately take action to prevent loss of service. It will either automatically attempt to restart applications before they fail, switch over to a secondary server, or alert the IT staff so that no downtime or loss of service is experienced. Once the issue is resolved, they are automatically switched back to the main servers and neither users nor administrators are required to restart their applications." Sounds wonderful. But there is just one small problem: RIM's servers in Canada. How does a solution that claims to "monitor the health of the entire email environment, including the server hardware, the network infrastructure, the application and the operating system," gain access to these? How does it "automatically attempt to restart applications before they fail [or] switch over to a secondary server" when those are in RIM's Canadian data centre? I put these questions to Neverfail, and the answer is that it doesn't. Here is their response. Note the bit that says: "assuming of course the RIM Infrastructure is up as of course we have no control over that aspect of the equation." "We provide 'uninterrupted availability of BlackBerry services to Vodafone business customers' by maintaining continuous availability for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server(s) located at a customer's data centre. We do in fact clone and subsequently asynchronously replicate all key data from the active to the passive server including the SRP required to authenticate with the towers in Canada. Therefore, if there is an issue with the primary server, we automatically failover to the secondary server thus keeping end-users continuously connected – assuming of course the RIM Infrastructure is up as of course we have no control over that aspect of the equation. So our availability is also dependent upon RIM." |
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